Interactive television is a relatively new phenomenon. Through interactive television, television viewers can use their remote controls or other input devices to affect what is seen and what functionality can be invoked on the television screen. Interactive television moves consumers to actively participate in television. Various forms of functionality, content and applications can be invoked with interactive television, including selecting information to be scrolled like a “ticker” across a portion of the television screen. Such information might be related to sports, weather, news, the stock market, or other information found to be of interest.
Consumer interaction through the television or over wireless devices is currently a difficult task, due in part to poor consumer/service provider interfaces and in part to strict agreements between service providers and their commercial partners. It is obviously advantageous for cable and wireless service providers to be able to provide their customers with the ability to interact with third party commercial partners. However, the service provider typically reaches individual agreements with each specific partner on both a business and technical level, thereby hindering scalability for each commercial partner. For example, the technical level agreement may not only contain mandates on connections and protocols, but also which specific information the partner is looking for on a screen or session level basis, and where that information can be entered by the customer. This can include applications that require completed input fields from the customer through remote controls such as “request for information” advertisements, television-commerce order forms, or games. With the increasing disparity of equipment, software, and environments, third party content providers have difficulty successfully deploying this content and applications in varied environments.
With regard to consumer/service provider interfaces, traditional purchasing methods by television-watching consumers have required the consumer to place a telephone call or log in to an Internet web site to purchase the materials shown on television. Once logged in, the consumer is required to enter text in text fields and make other selections in appropriate dialog boxes to convey necessary information to the vendor, such as billing and shipping information. Both of these methods require an investment of time and effort on the part of the consumer, which can lead to lost sales opportunities. Customization would improve customer interaction, but service providers and commercial partners typically find it unduly burdensome to customize on an individual consumer basis.
There is thus a need for a method of empowering television-watching consumers and wireless Internet surfers with simple access and functionality for purchasing items of interest discovered while interacting with their devices. There is also a need for a system for facilitating automated and simplified presentation of commercial partner information over a content network to users of devices having limited input environments.
By the present invention, there is provided a system and method for automatically storing and loading consumer information into commercial transaction pages. Consumer information can be stored through registration or through system interaction and is associated with tags from commercial participants which are stored based upon informational needs for consummating transactions. New commercial participants are easily integrated into the present system through storage and association of tags or target content markers. Commercial participant branding is maintained, and entry of consumer information is minimized and simplified.